Talented People Do Not Need a Better Offer. They Need a Visible Path.

The Higher Education Recruitment Consortium's 2025 Workforce Survey, gathering data from over 1,300 respondents across the sector, found that 46% cited career stagnation - not salary, not benefits, not workload - as their primary concern. They were not leaving for more money. They were leaving because they could not see a future inside their institution. That is a structural problem, not a compensation problem, and it requires a structural response.

France's Ministry of Higher Education recognised this a decade ago. In 2017, France Universités and sector associations began developing a national reference framework for managerial professions in HEIs. By 2018, formal CIO roles had been defined with published competency profiles. A structured training programme, documented in research presented at EUNIS 2025, subsequently enrolled nearly 200 participants across six years, with satisfaction rates between 80% and 95%. The key finding from that programme was qualitative: participants valued it not primarily for the skills learned, but for the network built and the professional isolation broken. They had been operating without peers who understood the specific demands of their role. The training gave them a community alongside a curriculum.

That is a dimension most institutional development programmes miss. Capability-building in higher education tends to be individual - a course here, a conference there - rather than cohort-based. But research consistently shows that the relational dimension of professional development is what drives sustained behaviour change. People who learn alongside colleagues facing the same operational problems apply what they learn differently from those who attend a workshop alone and return to an unchanged environment.

The Deloitte 2025 Higher Education Trends report identified leadership turnover as a compounding factor in the talent problem. When over 20% of senior leaders turn over in a two-year period, institutions lose not just individuals but the informal knowledge networks those individuals maintained. Development pipelines that were not formalised dissolve. Successor candidates who were being prepared informally find themselves in roles they were not structurally ready for. The institutions most resilient to leadership turnover are those that have built development logic into their organisational design - where growing into a role is not dependent on a single sponsoring leader, but is embedded in a pathway that outlasts any individual's tenure.

Gartner's 2025 data on higher education CIOs surfaces the same dynamic from a different angle: only 15% of education CIOs leveraged business technologists to expand their IT talent pipeline in 2024. The vast majority were hiring for roles that existed rather than developing people into the roles that were needed. This is not a technology leadership problem specifically. It is a sector-wide habit of filling positions rather than building capability.

The WEF's Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that the skills rising most rapidly in value - analytical thinking, resilience, adaptability, technological literacy - are precisely the skills that structured professional development can build in people who already understand the institutional context. Hiring externally for those skills is slow and expensive, and the people hired rarely navigate institutional culture as effectively as those developed from within. The more productive question for most HEIs is not 'who can we recruit?' but 'who do we already have, and what would it take to develop them into the roles the institution actually needs next?'